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The Case Against Zero-Defect Software

Testing is a necessary but not a value-added task. To put it another way, while testing is something we have to do, our users would be just as happy if we could produce quality software without it. Understanding that leads to a realistic approach to testing.

Your First Blazor App

Blazor is the Microsoft toolset that exploits the WebAssembly standard to let you write C# code that will run in your browser. Here's how to set up Visual Studio 2017 and create your first app.

Maximizing Your Paycheck

An economic model design to explain profit margins may seem like an odd place to look for career advice, but here are five forces that you can harness to increase how much you get paid.

18 New Tools and Extensions for Visual Studio

We've got a new round-up of tools covering security code analysis, code generators, console apps and command-line arguments.

DNN Image Classification Using Keras

The Data Science Doctor provides a hands-on tutorial, complete with code samples, to explain one of the most common methods for image classification, deep neural network, used, for example, to identify a photograph of an animal as a "dog" or "cat" or "monkey."

Top Visual Studio Code Extensions from Individual Contributors

While the most popular extensions in the Visual Studio Code Marketplace are naturally dominated by Microsoft and some other big corporate names like Red Hat, many individual contributors are also making waves with useful tools.

'Hello World' for Your Smartphone: Your First Xamarin Application

Here's a step-by-step guide to creating a Xamarin project in Visual Studio 2017.

Dealing with Unsafe DELETEs in RESTful Services

Your DELETE request to the service just timed out. Surely, it's safe to send it again. Actually, it may not be.

Type Flexibility with Conditional Types

TypeScript applies type safety to JavaScript but, with conditional types, adds some flexibility in how consistent your types are.

Styling Xamarin.Forms Apps with CSS

New support for styling Xamarin.Forms apps with CSS may be controversial, but Greg Shackles thinks CSS is a powerful (and frequently maligned) solution to the problem of styling native mobile applications. See what he means in this hands-on tutorial.

Dealing with Unsafe Methods in RESTful Services

Your update request to the service just timed out. Is it safe to send it again? Maybe. Here's how to ensure that all your update, delete and add requests are safe plus some advice on what you should really be calling them and handling concurrency.

Really Rest: Eliminating Documentation by Implementing HATEOAS

If you want to implement a fully "REST-compliant" application you should address a critical question: How do consumers know what URLs to use? What if all the consumer needed to know was how to use the HTTP protocol and a little common sense?

Build Your First TypeScript Application (2018)

Here's what a real-world "Hello, World" TypeScript application looks like (beginning with a discussion of whether you need TypeScript at all).

Your First Xamarin.Forms Project

If you've got a recent version of Visual Studio (Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition, for example) then you can start creating an Android application. Here's what you need to do to get your first project set up.

Clustering Non-Numeric Data Using Python

The data science doctor explains everything you need to know about clustering data, the process of grouping items so those in a group (cluster) are similar and items in different groups are dissimilar.

Leveraging Raw SQL in Entity Framework Core

The ability to use SQL with Entity Framework Core has always been a cool feature. There's a new feature in Entity Framework Core that opens the door for whole new set of SQL-related functionality.

Setting Up Your TypeScript Application – 2018 Version

If you're wondering how to start integrating TypeScript into your development practices, here's both when to do it and how to do it.

Small Firm Offers Up Homegrown Tools for Creating Web Apps with C#, VB.NET

Proving that Visual Studio tools can come from all manner of sources, a small dev firm in the Canary Islands is offering up its own homegrown toolset -- developed during the creation of an accounting program -- as a commercial product to let C# and VB.NET coders create Web apps without all that JavaScript and CSS stuff.

Sound-Effect Audio with Xamarin.Forms

Wally builds an app prototype and in response to user feedback investigates how to play audio sound effects in response to events such as a button press.

Data Clustering with K-Means Using Python

Our Data Science Lab guru explains how to implement the k-means technique for data clustering, or cluster analysis, which is the process of grouping data items so that similar items belong to the same group/cluster.

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